Posts Tagged ‘Italian Language’

Percival Lowell was the astronomer most responsible for popularizing the idea of Martian canals.

It was the Italian astronomer, Schiaparelli, who first claimed to have observed watercourses he called ‘canali’. The Italian word was translated ‘canals’, but it also means simply ‘channels’. And many astronomers regarded them simply as that, natural features. However, at the end of the 19th century many confidently believed that Mars was the home of intelligent life, though astronomers were increasingly aware that Mars was not as hospitable as Earth. They believed it was a planet of vast deserts. Lovell, an American astronomer with an observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, was convinced that not only was there intelligent life on Mars, but that the Martians had a highly advanced civilization. They had constructed the canals he drew and mapped to bring water from their dying planet’s polar regions down to the equator to sustain life and civilization. He realized that the canals themselves would have been too small to observe from the Earth, but believed that the lines he saw were the surrounding tracts of lush, green vegetation, flourishing amid the encroaching Martian desert.

And he had a highly optimistic view of the moral progress of their civilization.

I found this brief passage quoting Lowell, and commenting on his view of the people of the Red Planet in The New Challenge of the Stars, by Patrick Moore and David A. Hardy, with a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke, (London: Michael Beazley Publishers Ltd 1977). Moore writes

Perhaps we may look back to the words of Percival Lowell, written in 1906. He may have been wrong in his interpretation of the so-called Martian canals, but at least he put forward an idealistic view of the attitude of his ‘Martians’. Whom, he believed, had outlawed warfare and had united in order to make the best of their arid world. There could be no conflict upon Mars. In Lowell’s words: ‘War is a survival among us from savage times, and affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation. The wisest realize that there are better ways of practicing heroism and other and more certain ends of ensuring the survival of the fittest. It is something people outgrow.’ Let us hope that we, too, have outgrown it before we set up the first base upon the red deserts of Mars. (p. 18).

The passage is shocking in its espousal of Social Darwinism, and the ‘survival of the fittest’. Moore himself had extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant views. But he was also firmly anti-War, no doubt strongly inspired by the death of his girlfriend during an air raid in World War II.

And would that humanity had outlawed war! We too also need, if not global government, at least global far-reaching global co-operation to fight the environmental decline of our own planet through climate change and mass extinction. Hardly a day goes by without another report in the papers about the immense seriousness of the environmental catastrophe. This last week two documentaries in particular on British TV warned us further about its extent. One was Drowning in Plastic, presented by Liz Bonnin, and the other was the final edition of Andrew Marr’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea on BBC. This last programme appeared to trace the origin of the science of ecology to Darwin, and claimed that humanity’s destruction of the world’s ecosystem was partly due to ignorance of this aspect of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

It’s a contentious claim, as I suspect that the awareness of the interconnectness of living creatures actually predates Darwin, and that other scientists and naturalists, like the German explorer Humboldt, also made their own important contributions to development of ecological awareness.

But regardless of Marr’s claim about Darwin, we do need to be more like Lowell’s Martians to develop the global political, economic and social systems we need to fight our species’ destruction of the environment and its myriads of living creatures. And sadly, this is still being fought by vested corporate interests, such as the oil industry in America, led by the Koch Brothers, and right-wing Conservative parties. Such as the Republicans and Donald Trump, as well as the Tories and Tweezer over this side of the Atlantic. Lowell’s Martians don’t exist, but Lowell idealistic vision of them still has lessons for us in our own world, beset by environmental degradation and corporate, imperialist warfare.

This is another short, important piece by RT about Black protests against the enslavement of people of sub-Saharan African heritage in Libya by Islamist butchers and barbarians, who have taken over the country since Killary and Obama sent the planes in to help them overthrow Gaddafi.

I’ve already put up a video from RT showing the protests that occurred in Paris yesterday. The brief description of the video simply states that

Dozens of people demonstrated against “any form of slavery” in front of the Libyan Embassy in Rome on Friday. The demonstration was organised by the Coalizione Internazionale Sans-Papiers e Migranti (CISPM) organisation, to denounce illegal slave auctions of migrants in Libya.

The dialogue is in Italian, with some French. The only English appears on a scarf held up by one man saying ‘Never Slavery’. One man holds up a piece of paper saying ‘Non a l’esclavage Nois dans Lybie and Algerie’ – ‘No to the slavery of Blacks in Libya and Algeria’.

I don’t know about Algeria. I understand that the secular government defeated the Islamists there, partly by committing hideous atrocities themselves in the guise of their enemies, and so discrediting them. Though the Islamists themselves were also capable of carrying out acts of savage barbarity.

Gaddafi wasn’t overthrown because he was a tyrant. It was because he had successfully defied Western, and more importantly, American imperialism. And the Neocons wanted his oil. Just like they invaded and looted Iraq for its. They were also terrified because he was planning to scrap the Petrodollar for the Gold Dinar, which would be used in preference over the American currency in the Middle East and Africa.

If this had occurred, the decades of prosperity America has accumulated due to its domination of that aspect of the oil economy would vanish. The country wouldn’t be able to refinance its debts, and you’d have a massive recession.

Couldn’t be allowed. So Killary and Obama sent the planes in, destroyed a whole country, and dragged it back to medieval barbarism.

And she has the utter, utter gall to pose as a feminist standing up for every woman. She’s a corporate whore, just like the men, who also pimp themselves out to the big corporations and Wall Street she mixes with, whether in the Republicans or Democrats.